Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-16, 12:40:
- By the way, perhaps I was a bit to harsh in that old thread. My apologies for that. 😔
And I was definitely being too old and grumpity. Hence for my edit to add humor!
It just seemed back in the actual day, things like EMS, UMB and shadow memory didn't actually exist for us until the 386 came out and could do it through EMM386.EXE and through the 386 chipsets. And at that stage, you would see 50 trident 9000i cards for every good ET4000 and maybe 10 x ET4000s for each GUI accelerated ISA card. Then TIGA was simply a dream, and you only ever knew it existed because WINTACH had the benchmarks for these cards included in the results.
I bit like MT32 or SC55 in those days was simply an option in the setup for some games, I didn't even realize they were external Midi modules until some years later.
Still, I think the most awesome waste of my RA50 (MT-32 synth in an arranger) lately is spending some hours playing Klondike via Sierra's Hoyles book of games on it. Of all the amazing things the MT-32 synth can offer, it is hilarious to use it just to listen to cards shuffle (in stereo mind you) and have the computer make bings when you stack cards!
As for the OP, I too have a soft spot for 286 12mhz computers ... it was my first system past the 8088, and I ended up making it work with my own work or money, back when buying a 3.5 inch floppy drive was a thing (I think I paid $60 AU for it back then in the early 90's) and you simply didn't fall over stacks of them. My 286 isn't nearly as fancy, with:
286-12mhz
No co-processor.
4meg ram
NE2000 clone ethernet card with XT-IDE Bios.
250gb hard drive (because they are quiet and I had lots)
Oak 067 512KB video card
Sound blaster 2.0 card (this was my original card, I gave it away many years ago and the kind soul ended up giving it back many years later) with newly added CMS chips.
3.5 inch 1.44meg drive
5.25 inch 1.22meg drive
Still fancier than what I grew up with by a long shot!